About Me

Buford C. Terrell
Controlled substances laws and their consequences have been the center of my professional life for over fifteen years. I host a public interest television program in Houston, “Drugs, Crime, and Politics” , produced by the Drug Policy forum of Texas, and have done so for most of its ten-year history. Before my retirement, I taught a seminar, “Controlled Substances Law” for many years at South Texas College of Law.
In this blog I intend to explore the features and consequences of those laws, especially the unintended consequences, and look at the need for, and possibility of, changing them. Don’t expect a lot of breaking news or current events, although there will be some. My approach will be more historical and theoretical. I hope to get a lot of criticism – good, bad, and otherwise – and to start some good, heated discussions.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Dogs in the Night

Dogs
in the Night

In
“Silver Blaze” Sherlock Holmes remarked that the case depended on the strange
behavior of the dog in the night. When
Dr. Watson objected that the dog had done nothing, Holmes replied that was
precisely the point: a normal dog would have barked.

Americans
legalized marijuana de facto, thought
still not de jure, fifty years ago
(Hmm, sounds like another essay topic to me).
During that half-century, many dogs have chosen not to bark. Now is the time to point out this strange
behavior.

Who
are these sleeping dogs? Drug Warriors
have populated the world with slumbering beasts that, taking a single smell of
marijuana, will leap up as growling, snarling, baying Cujos (perhaps
“Baskervillean hounds” would better preserve the metaphor) rampaging to destroy
the world if their Prohibition leashes were removed. Here are some of the members of that strange
bestiary.

Reefer Madness: The Marihuana Tax Act rode in on the back of
the insane marijuana-crazed killer. That
dog, which lived only in one trumped-up newspaper story, a Bureau of
Narcotics-funded movie, and Harry Anslinger’s testimony, fell asleep as soon as
the act was passed and has been in a coma since the 1940s. Drug Warriors still refer to it on rare
occasions; why are they never asked to give an example?

Drug-addled Children: Everyone has heard that drugs must remained
banned to prevent untold masses of children from becoming irredeemable addicts
and destroying their futures, if not their very lives. Since the mid-1970s, 18 states and the
District of Columbia have accepted medical marijuana and about the same number
have decriminalized personal possession or use.
In a history now spanning forty years, teen use in medical and
decriminalized states is still no higher than in Prohibition states, and is no
higher than it was in those states before they reduced or eliminated
penalties. Ironically, Monitoring the
Future has consistently shown that illegal marijuana is easier for teens to get
than is legal alcohol. The
child-devouring dog slumbers on.

DUI Dog: This beast was also born in Reefer Madness and is the whelp of that
bitch Drunken Driving. If getting stoned
is anything at all like getting drunk, then the highways should be littered
with corpses. After all, the government’s
own statistics claim that over 100,000,000 living adults have tried marijuana,
and all of them were not just sitting at home.
This dog has not just slept through the revolution, it too has fallen
into a deeper trance. In medical
marijuana states, drunk-driving deaths have decreased by about eight per cent. Well done scientific studies have slipped a
strong sleeping dose to this cur. It’s
comatose now.

Bad Health Bugbears: One of the scariest of the frightening dogs
that have slumbered through the de facto
night is the fear of what marijuana might do to its user’s health. That dog has not just slept through the past
half-century, it has faded from existence.
This cur’s first growl was that marijuana caused chromosome damages in
Rhesus monkeys. When those studies were
thoroughly discredited, the clamor was raised that, since marijuana is smoked,
it must cause lung cancer just like tobacco cigarettes. When the U.C.L.A. Lung Institute showed heavy
marijuana smokers had lower rates of lung cancer than cigarette smokers, the
beast just grumbled “It must be bad for your general health” and went back to
sleep. Now a whole series of long-term
(20 – 30 years) studies of thousands of marijuana smokers show that they have
no measurable health differences from the general population. This fleabag is sleeping so soundly it will
never wake up.

Lazy Old Hound: This animal snarled at teens to avoid the
amotivational syndrome (where do they come up with these names?). It claims that all potheads soon develop
couch-lock, get lost in the Doritos bag, and accomplish nothing. Did they ever see Willie Nelson, still
touring and playing about two hundred concerts a year and with a new movie
coming out next month – at age 79. Did it
ever hear about Prof. Carl Sagan, astronomer, author, NASA consultant, and
creator-star of the PBS Cosmos series
– or Louis Armstrong – or Barak Obama?

All
of these mutts sleep in the Drug Warriors’ kennels, ready to be trotted out
anytime an audience needs to be scared into maintaining Prohibition. They will continue to serve as horrible
warnings until their strange behavior is pointed out. Anytime one of these beasts is put on
display, reformers must point out how soundly they have slept through the last
forty years.

1 comment:

Lest we not forget the killer hound whose sleepy legacy cannot produce a single human death directly attributed to cannabis use... or the gateway drug dog who has hopefully and finally been put to sleep forever after congressman Steve Cohen's brilliant milk theory was explained to a federal drug warrior.